Independence and Dependence

It would probably be better just to ignore Barone’s latest article, but his argument contains so many dubious and fantastical claims that it is useful as an example of how short Republican memories are and how stupid mainstream conservative pundits must think their audience is. One of the most incredible claims is one of Barone’s most important:

The Progressives have always assumed that people needed safety nets and would welcome dependence on government. The public’s clear rejection of the Democratic health care bills has shown that this assumption was unwarranted. Americans today prefer independence to dependence on government, just as they did 200 years ago [bold mine-DL].

If we have found out anything over the last few months, it is that the public’s views on health care and health care legislation in particular are anything but clear. For every survey showing a narrow majority declaring the bill to be a “bad thing,” there is another survey that shows real opposition to the bill is closer to 40% of the population (i.e., the base of the opposition party). The polling numbers fluctuate depending on the phrasing and timing of the questions, and the reasons for opposition are many and varied. There has been no “clear public rejection” as of yet. Much of the opposition to health care legislation has came from Republican Medicare defenders and voters 65+ who overwhelmingly oppose the bill because the new legislation reduced Medicare payments. Real entitlement reform is unthinkable and Paul Ryan’s proposed budget is politically radioactive (and totally unacceptable to his own party leaders) because most Americans are quite satisfied with significant dependence on government. This health care bill is a bad bill in part because it exacerbates and deepens this problem. The trouble is that there are scant few heirs of the Founders out there, and the more you press modern Americans you will find that hardly any of them actually believe that the federal government should be as limited, small and relatively weak as all of the Founders believed it should be.

In the last ten years, it has been the party of insolvency, the Republican Party, that has been offering up free lunches and government expansion: new entitlements and lower taxes. I won’t pretend that the Democratic Party is really any more fiscally responsible, because it is not, but it is important to understand that the discontent the bill is causing does not derive on the whole from hostility to bigger government as such. The political problem is that the new legislation will impose some costs instead of providing subsidies that will be paid for entirely by the next generation. To the extent that the health care bill is unpopular, it is mostly unpopular because it theoretically deprives people of benefits from the government they are used to receiving. What we are more likely to see is the restoration of all cuts under tremendous pressure from the constituencies that depend on them.

I should also object to Barone’s retrojection of 20th century political issues onto the late eighteenth century. Liberty and independence were watchwords of the revolutionary and early republican period, and there was a strong Country political tradition that stressed the importance of economic independence as the basis for political liberty and constitutional government. This was the tradition Jefferson relied on as he articulated his agrarian republican theory, which so many supposed defenders of American identity mock and scorn, and it had as much to do with opposing concentrated private wealth as it had to do with opposing concentrated power in government. On the whole, the Republican Party has opposed and repudiated this tradition for its entire history, and it is only a series of historical accidents that have led any sympathizers with this tradition to align themselves with this party in recent decades.

The struggle between the Crown and the patriot rebels was not concerned with dependence on the state of the kind we debate today. Obviously, the independence sought by the rebels was that of would-be sovereign states separating themselves from the existing polity. The points of contention were encroachments of Parliament against the rights of colonial legislatures, the imposition of taxes without the consent of those legislatures, and an unwillingness on the part of colonials to shoulder part of the tax burden needed by the British state for funding the colonies’ common defense. It was a matter of retaining political prerogatives and chartered rights guaranteed to all Englishmen. As attractive as a simplistic scheme of anti-statist/statist can be, this completely misrepresents the nature of the struggle before and during our War for Independence.

What is more, the Founders did not “stand for the expansion of liberty,” but obviously were committed to the preservation of existing chartered liberties. From their perspective, there was no question of expanding liberty. The issue was one of protecting what liberty they had against the encroachments of Crown and Parliament. In many respects, they would have agreed with the Burkean idea that liberty had to be limited in order to be possessed. Their conception of liberty was on the whole a negative one. They aimed to limit and constrain what the government could do, and constructed a political structure that they hoped would do that. As many Antifederalists warned at the time, the restrictions and checks on government power would prove to be illusory and ineffective. In any case, for the Founders there was no notion of “expanding liberty.” That suggests a kind of activism and an idea of positive liberty that would have made much more sense to later Progressives. Indeed, many mainstream conservatives today speak of “advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world” that would only make sense in light of a Progressive interpretation of American principles.

It is all very well to look to the Founders for guidance and argue that we should adhere strictly to the constitutional limits they envisioned for the federal government, but it is useless to pretend that political opposition fueled by dependence on existing entitlements and partisan attachment to an historically centralizing party that normally favors the interests of concentrated wealth have anything to do with fidelity to the ideas of the Founders.

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10 Responses to Independence and Dependence

…because most Americans are quite satisfied with significant dependence on government. This health care bill is a bad bill in part because it exacerbates and deepens this problem.

You speak as if dependence on global corporations and the benevolence of employers what are in a rat race to reduce the wage differential with China were preferable. It’s a case of pick your poison, and right now, my fear of government isn’t all that high.

M.Z.: Though I don’t claim to know what it suggests w/r/t policies he would support, I suspect Daniel’s response to the “choice” of government dependence vs corporate dependence would be “how ’bout neither?”.

“the more you press modern Americans you will find that hardly any of them actually believe that the federal government should be as limited, small and relatively weak as all of the Founders believed it should be.”

I think you need to read more about the Founding Fathers. First of all, which one are you talking about? They all had different ideas of what the federal government should be. That’s why I find the notion that there is one over-arching view that encompasses their thoughts is a ridiculous one.

Specifically, Madison’s Virginia plan sought an executive veto FOR ALL STATE LAWS. That was replaced in the Constitution by the supremacy clause and the necessary and proper clause, which gave the federal government the power over the states.

Washington wrote this in a letter that accompanied the Constitution that was sent to the ratifying committees:

‘It is obviously impracticable in the federal government of these states, to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all — Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest.”

He then proceded to use the standing army to break up the Whiskey Rebellion, which was a violation of the Constitution…and led it himself.

No one could possibly read the Federalist Papers from Alexander Hamilton (and Madison) and come to the conclusion that Hamilton wanted a limited and weak federal government. No one could possibly study the actions of Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury (national bank, assumption of state debts) and conclude that either. Washington signed off on all of these policies. Then there were the Alien and Sedition Acts of Adams’ Presidency.

Jefferson and Madison undoubtedly opposed the strengthening of government under Washington, Hamilton, and Adams. But it was more out of self interest to their regions. When they came into power, it was a different story. I would submit that banning all overseas commerce and all INTERSTATE commerce except for food, as Jefferson/Madison did with the Embargo Acts, does not exemplify the view of a limited and weak federal government.

I love this blog, and think it is one of the few bastions of reasons out there, especially when it comes to foreign policy. For that reason, I would encourage you not to fall into the rhetorical nonsense talk that goes around regarding “the will of the Founding Fathers.” 99% of it is bunk.

One of the reasons why conservatives like Barone prattle on about the Founding Fathers when they clearly don’t know what the heck they’re talking about is that right wing history almost completely ignores the remaking of America in the Civil War. Conservatives and GOPers can’t take on the alterations made to the Founders design by Lincoln/circumstances/inevitability largely because they’ve remade themselves as the political representatives of White Folk, crippling their ability to question any Civil War-related changes to America’s social and political structure.

If you flush the Civil War down the memory hole, it becomes almost impossible to understand how the country of the Founders became the society of today. That confusion invites fuzzy and/or irrational thinking.

Yes, Federalists wanted a stronger and more centralized government relative to what existed, and the more ambitious of them wanted much more of a consolidated government than most at Philadelphia were willing to accept. Antifederalists assumed that the centralization of power the Constitution represented would lead to great abuses of power and encroachment on the rights of the states and the people. I don’t claim that “the Founders” all shared a singular vision or agreed among themselves on the size and scope of the federal government. I would insist that they were operating within a consensus that would have never envisioned or accepted a federal government remotely as powerful, centralized and intrusive as the one we have today. There doesn’t have to be uniformity among them for my statement to make sense.

I had to laugh when I read that. It would probably be better just to ignore pretty much any of Barone’s articles.

Barone cliams that, “The Founders stood for the expansion of liberty and the Progressives for the expansion of government.”

To maintain that someone who campaings for the rights of the oppressed necessarily “stands for the expansion of government” always grates on me. As a liberal, unafraid to use that term, I satnd for a government that serves the needs of its citizens. National defense, protection of natural resources and, yes, safety net to the extent that one is needed. To accomplish that I accept that government might become larger than I really want it to be, but I am “standing for” human rights and human needs, and not for the enlargement of government. I regard the latter as something to be resisted; to be accepted only to the degree necessary to serve the former.

I would insist that they were operating within a consensus that would have never envisioned or accepted a federal government remotely as powerful, centralized and intrusive as the one we have today.

Who knows? I wouldn’t be blithely answer the question no. When they were offering their thoughts, the technology, physical and intellectual were greatly more primative. In as much as the Constitution is a repudiation of the Articles, I think one should give credence to what they were repudiating, and one of the things they were repudiating was a passive federal government subject to the whims of the states.

Citing the founders can get you most anywhere. You can marshall arguments that they wouldn’t have entered WWII for example. When marshalling those arguments though, you have to ignore that they arose from practical realities. If victory would have been sure – a reckless premise surely – the colonials would have invaded Canada. Many pined to do so anyway.

I suspect Daniel’s response to the “choice” of government dependence vs corporate dependence would be “how ’bout neither?”.
That is well and good, but it doesn’t substantively address why the recent past (corporate dominanted insurance schemes) are vastly superior to the present (the past with a federally regulated, universally accessible market.) While there is no requirement for a path to neither, the absence of one should remove it from consideration over which is better in our present reality.

I would insist that [the Founders] were operating within a consensus that would have never envisioned or accepted a federal government remotely as powerful, centralized and intrusive as the one we have today.

The Founders consensus is bound to an historical context that’s unrecognizable– they lived in a world where the price of a commodity took a month to transmit across the Atlantic, where women and a third the population of the south were considered chattels, and where the question of provision of “medical care” was moot because nothing styled medical care worked.

I would also point out that the “consensus” of the Founders tended to support federal public provision of services that nowadays seem very quaint, such as postage.

Citing the founders can get you most anywhere.

That’s just cynical. The Founders with a capital F definitely had a viewpoint on what it meant to be a free person, and what the prerogatives of a state should be. The problem I see is that, absent George III, muskets and indian tribes on the frontier, the opinions of the Founders speak with little authority on specific modern matters. It’s our state to run, they’re dead and gone, and so is everyone that they fought, and it’s up to us to define our rights and state in the context of our customs.

I don’t think you can insist on that for many of the reasons that MZ has stated. What could be more powerful, centralized, and intrusive that keeping merchants from shipping their goods overseas? Or than banning people from speaking against the government? Or than using the standing army to put down a domestic revolt? The actions that the Founders actually took when they were in power fly in the face of your assertion.

There is no way of knowing for sure, and obviously if you plopped the Founders down in the present day, they would be shocked by a great man things (including the complete integration of African Americans into American society, something that they were sure could never happen, except for maybe Adams.) But if these men were to be granted immortality, and if they had lived from then and to now, my guess is that Jefferson and Madison would have sided with the GOP, and Washington, Adams, and Hamilton would side with the Dems. My guess is that Hamilton specifically would be ecstatic with our current form of government.

I’m going to go out a limb and suggest that if Jefferson were alive today he would be completely bored by what passes for political debate at the national level. More likely he would be living at Monticello tinkering with his inventions and reading his books:)